


Constants

by orphan_account



Series: Cophine Drabbles [4]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Freeform, Gen, Mathematics, Purple Prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-30
Updated: 2014-10-30
Packaged: 2018-02-23 06:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2537432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the bright red agony of being left behind Delphine loses her footing. Maman tells her gently to stop crying and less gently to get up, to forget. She tries, though without his C constant in her life no longer makes sense. </p><p>Delphine Cormier, as mapped by an equation without values</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constants

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Fractals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/503306) by [FelicityGS](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FelicityGS/pseuds/FelicityGS). 



> This was inspired by the (fantastic) story above. It belongs to a different fandom, but the idea of a character expressing themselves through maths is such a gorgeous one and I couldn't get the idea out of my head.

Delphine is a scientist. She observes. Predicts. Tests. Crushes up results in a pale hand and begins again. She does not get attached to things fickle as equations.

She does not create so much as unravel, pulling on the threads that bind universes together, watching how they fit as they come apart in her fingers, eyes stained and hands dusty with the wonder of it.

Her mother said to her once, over a bottle of something bitter, that she should have named her for a spider, not a dolphin. It wasn’t a compliment. Delphine keeps it close.

Perhaps her mother is right, she thinks, paging absently through microscope slide memories, pricking herself on the occasional jagged edge. She has always liked her webs.

Delphine is 5 and handing out hugs like they are simple truths. Her hands are warm with the constant of smiles she receives in return.

This coldness though, the exoskeleton – Delphine did not build it intentionally. It was more the dependent variable of a life spent unraveling.

She is 9 and Papa is packing every shred of his existence into brown boxes and leaving. Her bare feet curl on the front porch until they bleed, and in the bright red agony of being left behind she loses her footing. Maman tells her gently to stop crying and less gently to get up, to forget. She tries, though without his C constant in her life no longer makes sense. 

She is 14 and sat in _les urgences_ , and in the bright chemical vapour she sees her family as a cubic graph. The Cormiers fill all quadrants with presence yet never align, and the shock hurts worse than her broken hand, though the nurse does not believe her when she says her wrist doesn’t account for the corrosion in her throat.

She never loses the acid – the gap is plugged with cigarettes, and the unsolved pain of C circles smoke rings round her head.

At 18 she is offered a place with DYAD, and she leaps, hoping finally her equation will make sense.

She throws herself into the work, spinning webs, wildly, casting out in all directions. She hopes they will catch her, as she climbs through the ranks to dizzying precipices where morals shift like tides. On such a lonely height the vertigo is such that she’s forgotten what it’s like to equal something. She’s forgotten which variable she searches for. She is cold up on her ledge. She no longer really minds.

She is an integral approaching its limits.

Answers unravel faster in half healed hands.

It’s not until later (too late, far too late) that she realises, warm in a test subject’s bed, the touch of someone no longer a number lingering on her body, that she wasn’t searching for a variable at all.

C is for constant. For Cosima.

The word trips on her tongue.

Delphine unravels as the first tear falls.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm actually not a maths person, so I apologise for anything that doesn't make sense. (If anyone wants to flag stuff up that would be be great). Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed.


End file.
